8 | Search Engine Optimization

There are so many SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, tips out there that it can be incredibly overwhelming. The good news is that for interior designers there only a few select strategies you need to use.

For interior designers, I recommend you focus just on the aspects that are going to have the biggest impact for SEO:

  • Your business name

  • Your personal name

  • The cities or specific regions you serve

  • The phrase “interior designer” or “interior design firm”

Rank for your personal name and business name

In the chapter on Logo design, we went over the important elements of a good business name. It should be easy to say, easy to spell, easy to type, easy to remember and also not commonly used.

If you do all of those things and include them on your website then your website will rank high on Google. This is one of the most important aspects of SEO because typically 25% to 50% of the traffic to your website will come from either searches of your business name or your personal name. 

If you already have a website, make sure to search for your business name and see where you rank on Google. If you have a generic business name like ‘Classic Interiors International’ you’re likely competing with all sorts of other websites - sometimes they won’t even be businesses, but Wikipedia articles or news websites instead.

The right business name will dramatically impact how many people actually find your website through SEO. Clients are going to type your business name into www.google.com just as often as they’ll type your website domain name into their browser search bar, such as www.justinpagewood.com.

The same will go with your personal name or your team members’ names, which is why it is also important that you create a ‘brand' around your own personal name for the sake of being found easily on Google searches. If you have a common name such as ‘Sally Smith,’ that can also hurt your visibility on Google, which is why many celebrities and brands embellish their name with additional words such as ‘Sarah Michelle Gellar,’ or at the very least include the word ‘Interiors’ at the end of the brand name, as long as you are the only interior designer with that name, such as ‘Sally Smith Interiors.’ 

Focus on the Cities where your best clients live

Getting ranked well on Google for generic keywords like ‘Interior Designer’ can take a very long time unless you spend a lot of resources and money trying to get there.

But for interior designers the best strategy is to focus on a city or small regions where you get your best clients and incorporate them into your website.

For instance, ‘California interior designer’ is very generic. ‘Los Angeles interior designer’ is better but is still competing with thousands of other interior designers in the Los Angeles metro area. A much better strategy is to focus on something like ‘Pasadena interior designer’ or even a smaller city like ‘South Pasadena interior designer.’ Even though there are several interior designers based in South Pasadena, California, this will help you rank as high as possible in an area where your clients live and can likely get you close to Page 1 in a search. 

While there are many other ways to try and rank for interior design keywords, I have found over and over again for many years that high-end homeowners are going to almost always search for this easy formula on Google:

‘Interior Design’ + ‘City or Region.’

For example:

  • Austin, TX Kitchen Designer

  • Miami Interior Designer

  • Brooklyn Interior Design Staging

This is exactly how affluent clients search on Google and is really the only way you should focus your efforts. Once you focus on a few key cities or regions, you can continue to build on this focus by having a Google Business listing with the same cities as your services areas at www.google.com/business as well as having your www.yelp.com page set up in those same areas, and to continue to be known as ‘the’ interior designer for that city or region.

You may have 10 or 20 other interior designers in the same area as you, but don’t forget that clients are also looking for the right style or approach in that city. 

So let’s say you specialize in classical interior design in South Pasadena, California. A client may find you on Google and like your classical approach versus someone else’s modern approach and contact you for that very reason, because they like your website, portfolio, and style. But you should still primarily focus your SEO keywords on the cities and regions that your best clients live in because that is how the affluent homeowner is going to begin their search for an interior designer.